Under the Cherry Moon

It is fast and featherweight, and the diminutive Prince is funny, cheekily charming and pretty as a picture.

Should you subject yourself or your loved ones to Under the Cherry Moon, my family recommends following it up-quickly- with Purple Rain or Sign 'o' the Times as a palate cleanser.

It's strange that so few critics seemed to understand that it's a silly film, purposefully so, and tried to use their prose to laugh at it - as if Prince weren't laughing way ahead of them. He was TELLING the joke.

Like Elvis Presley, Prince has the charisma to carry an atrocious movie-real fans just want to see him-but even Elvis never got so carried away with himself that he thought he could direct.

Cherry Moon had some potential as a cultish Trading Places. But it drowns in its pretenses. No doubt, Prince fancies himself an auteur in his directing debut. But he has no restraint, no true vision. It's as if we've all been mooned.

In Under the Cherry Moon, Prince does more for movie musicals than any performer since Frank Sinatra and more for bared midriffs than any sex symbol since Little Egypt. Forgive me, Madonna, but it's true.

I found this ego-trip, in black and white, painfully tedious.

It's not exactly Lubitsch, to be sure, but it's an attractive and diverting comedy.

Under the Cherry Moon is a great title -- but sadly, that's about all.

Something that is both beautiful (Michael Ballhaus' cinematography is exquisite) and bizarre -- a screwball comedy where Prince and Benton gleefully ham it up for the camera.